The
science of microbiology started with the invention of the microscope.
The English scientist Robert
Hooke is credited with being the first person to use
a microscope for academic study. That was in the early 1660's.
In 1665 Hooke published his landmark book Micrographia,
which described the microscopic world for the first time.
Hooke studied plant sections, in particular cork and he drew what
he saw, which was a matrix of tiny cylindrical-like structures he
called cells.
Later researchers saw such structures in all types of living organism
and Hooke's naming remained. Today it is considered to be
a foundation stone in the understanding of microbiology.

(Left)
A sketch of Hooke's microscope. (Right) No images of
Hooke survive. Willen Church in Buckinghamshire, England,
was designed by Robert Hooke who also discovered Hooke's Law and
the Great Red Spot on the planet Jupiter.

Meanwhile
in continental Europe others, such as Marcello
Malpighi in Italy and Antonie
van Leeuwenhoek in the Netherlands, were using microscopes to
look at animal and plant tissue. Van Leeuwenhoek examined a
drop of rainwater and noticed it contained tiny creatures he called
"animalicules" or little
eels. These were in fact bacteria
and so van Leeuwenhoek became the first person to study bacteria.

Some
form of microbiological treatment was practiced by many people, throughout
the two hundred year period after Hooke and van Leeuwenhoek, but this
was with very little understanding of the microbial processes involved.
Primitive
forms of smallpox inoculation developed in Turkey in the seventeenth
century were brought to England around 1720. This involved creating
reasonably large open wounds in the arm with a knife and pasting in
serum taken from the pusy sores of victims. It was effective
- sometimes - and even some members of the royal family underwent
the procedures. Elsewhere in England, particularly at
Yetminster
in Dorset, cowherds and milkmaids had noticed the immunizing effects
of cowpox in apparently preventing smallpox,
and they too practiced a form of open-wound inoculation on local people.

However,
the credit for the invention of inoculation now goes to Edward
Jenner who in 1796 injected cowhand James
Phipps with cowpox. Jenner gets the credit because
he carried out his work using accepted scientific method and wrote
it up afterwards, though the ethics of deliberately injecting the
experimental subject with smallpox some six weeks later is questionable!
Fortunately, the boy did not develop smallpox and Jenner became
rich and famous as a result. It was from this risky beginning
that the science of immunization developed.

While
many scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century studied
plant and animal structures under the microscope, the real science
of microbiology only began in the latter half of the nineteenth
century, when high- magnification microscopes of good optical quality
became more widely available. The most notable person was
Ferdinand J Cohn who in 1875
effectively founded the science of bacteriology (a branch of microbiology
which studies bacteria). His main contribution was the
classification of bacteria, and he coined the term Bacillus.

Louis
Pasteur was probably the greatest biologist of the nineteenth
century. He developed the germ
theory of disease, which was a significant breakthrough
in medicine that ultimately improved the health of everyone on the
planet. He was also able to prove that life itself did not
"spontaneously come into being"
through a series of experiments using a sterilized flask.
He successfully showed that life can only be generated from existing
life, thus closing debate - so he thought - that had obsessed science
and theology for a long time (though current ideas and successes
in the field of "creating life" has re-opened
the issue). Pasteur also showed that fermentation -
a process used in baking and brewing
- was caused by microorganisms. As a result of this
work he went on to develop the process for sterilizing milk and
this was named after him - pasteurization.
He is also credited with the development of vaccines, most notably
for rabies and anthrax. In addition, he identified and eliminated
disease in silkworms. He was also interested
in the idea of panspermia
that was promoted by Lord Kelvin
in 1871, and went on to examine the Orgeuil
meteorite for signs of life.

Since
the time of these pioneers, almost every year major breakthroughs
in microbiological science have been made. Both individuals
and, more recently, teams of people have contributed to our understanding
of the science. They have taken it from being primarily a
branch of medicine to become a means of food production, a branch
of study for engineers, an integral part of understanding ecology
and the environment, a foundation-stone of the chemical and biochemical
industries, and of tremendous interest to those engaged in all aspects
of space research and exploration.